A Maze of Glass, Chapter Nineteen, Pt. 1
Frank had told them that the Belgian’s team probably planned to attack during the funeral. The Belgian’s crew had set up numerous spell matrices in the area, as had the Malleus crew, and as soon as Jill and her found family left the house, someone would active one or another of them. Frank didn’t seem to know which matrix did what, or even what his coven expected the material outcome of their various spells to look like.
Zoe hadn’t believed him. But whatever the dreamer had shown him, it had left him shivering and unresponsive for hours after he awoke. Even when he started moving again, he spent the rest of the day showering under increasingly-cold water.
So they’d improvised.
They took four vehicles to the funeral. Zoe took guardianship over Darnell and Clarissa Tims-Briar, driving a black sedan two car-lengths behind Darnell’s. Omar followed the SUV carrying Karen, Jill, and the other three children.
Everything en route to the cemetery looked vaguely familiar to Zoe. The whole of Salem shivered with deja vu.
As they drew closer, Darnell slowed down. He swerved onto a road shoulder, parked, unparked, and pulled away. Zoe felt it, too, though even her finely honed sixth sense paled in comparison to a psychic’s. All the deja vu familiarity crystallized into actual recognition. Her sixth sense shrieked warnings, her lizard brain screeched and thrashed.
She didn’t just feel familiarity—she knew this place. She knew it well.
She’d surveilled it.
(two cemeteries backed up against an arc of parkland)
“Something’s happening here,” Zoe told her headset.
“We’ll be there in five,” Omar replied through an earbud.
She felt energy in the air. It was the sort of sensation normal people rarely but occasionally experienced, the instinctive sense of an oncoming storm, of something rippling through electro-magnetic fields, detectable but only unconsciously. The breeze blowing through the dashboard vents carried a faint, real-and-not-real scent of heating ozone.
Darnell hovered around the speed limit, brake lights flashing more often than seemed necessary. Or just as often. Who knew?
Ozone heated and burnt. The scent clung inside her nostrils. All the small hairs on her body straightened. A ripple of instinct anxiety crawled coolly down her spine. With a gloved hand she unclasped her sidearm holster. She moved the submachine gun from the passenger seat to her lap, keeping the heavy navy blanket over it as a form of half-assed camouflage. Something was happening. But what?
The attack. But how?
(once you’re sure that magic exists you can’t be sure of anything else ever)
“Guys?” Zoe asked.
“Two minutes, gaining.”
They approached a tangled knot of intersection and she saw them. Standing on the sidewalk, Lacey and two other members of the Belgian’s crew scanned the area. Zoe saw them see Darnell’s car as it rolled forward, obeying the speed limit.
Someone in a heavy four-wheel drive box didn’t see their light turn red. They didn’t obey the speed limit.
The four-wheel hammered Darnell’s sedan from the passenger side and sent the thing spinning. Another car shrieked rubber too late to make a difference—the brakes dipped the hood and slammed it under Darnell’s. The car flipped and rolled. More cars swerved and banked, one more colliding with Darnell’s and two more colliding with each other. Ozone and rubber stink filled the intersection. Horns howled, steel crunched, glass shattered. Zoe yanked up on her emergency brake, barely avoiding the pile-up. In the moments after the accident, everything went silent. The strewn vehicles wore streaks of blood. Nothing moved behind the airbags.
(when is a car crash just a car crash after all and when is it the result of)
(in modern parlance a ‘death curse’ was just a curse that altered probability fields until)
(Zo’…there are people following my husband)
People started screaming. Some screamed into phones, some at each other, some at the very idea that what had just happened had happened.
Through the screaming bystanders, Zoe saw them: Lacey and the Belgian’s crew. Their jaws hung agape, lips trying for words that didn’t come out. Even they hadn’t expected something this bad. Lacey stumbled backwards, fingers at her mouth. Zoe couldn’t read lips but could imagine the sorts of pleas she muttered.
But when a black SUV pulled around the disaster and stopped in front of them, they all got inside anyway.
Zoe released the emergency brake, threw the car in drive, and hit the gas.
Turn Back
...coming soon...
Table of Contents
